Meditation+on+Essential+Question+2

Meditation on Essential Question 2

How can we bridge the gap between home and school literacies?

Throughout this semester, I've often thought that the speech patterns of the parents and the culture of the home and neighborhood can undo, on a nightly basis, the solid work accomplished by the English teachers, and the students, in class every day. Bridging this gap is crucial. Code-switching exercises are essential to the kind of community-building required for students and teachers to share and imitate each other's diction. In the cases of struggling students who don't speak, and sometimes don't understand, English as it is spoken by their teachers, collaboration between teachers and parents is necessary to bridging the gap between home and school literacies. It is important that teachers understand the primary discourse of the students as well. Just because the teachers may not speak Ebonics, for example, doesn't mean he/she shouldn't understand it. Just as it is important for a Spanish teacher to understand the different constructions between English and Spanish, an English teacher should understand the dialect of the students in order to understand the common pitfalls in this unique process of language acquisition.

While I was student-teaching, there was an English teacher who bonded with the students but resented how their primary discourse would find its way into his class despite how frequently he emphasized the importance of speaking grammatical English. There was a rule stating that students could go to the bathroom only during the first and last ten minutes of each class. One student raised her hand and asked, "Why we can't go to the bathroom?" The teacher refused to answer until she phrased the question according to the rules of grammar. She didn't recognize her mistake, and he explained that saying, "Why can't we..." instead of "Why we can't..." would have made a huge difference. He then noted during a job interview or an interview with a college administrator, the one simple grammatical error could cost her a potential job or admission to a decent school. I think it would have been more effective if he had quoted Lisa Delpit, or at least referred to her work to emphasize the importance of being able to speak the language of power. If he had been familiar with code-switching exercises, he might have been more tolerant of the mistake and found a way to incorporate it in his next grammar lesson. Without a sense of community in the classroom, it will be impossible to enjoy these code-switching exercises. When the teachers harshly judge the primary discourse of their students, their rejections are sometimes based on politics and prejudice.

Bridging the gap between home and school literacies can also be achieved by continuing to find innovative ways to teach grammar. Jeff Anderson's //Mechanically Inclined// offers plenty of such methods, such as an exercise designed to help students turn fragments into complete sentences called "Two Word Sentence Smack Down." The assignment in the Linguistics Dimensions Study Phase 1, which involved visiting and researching some of the communities in which the students in Lauren King's class lived, helped me, as a student-teacher, grasp some of the cultural and linguistic differences, and similarities, that, if I wanted to help bridge this gap, I would have to be aware of in class. Linguistics Dimension Study Phase 2 also helped me become aware of the common errors and ungrammatical speech patterns of the students.

I think reading student writing and researching the culture and backgrounds of the students I'm going to teach will help me make informed decisions as to the most effective way to teach them the language of power.

Linguistic Dimension Study

Grammar Instruction

Module 4

Sentence Gems

Focused Freewrite